The Moscow Exchange Committee and the Regulation of the Russian Empire’s Securities Market: Practices of Securities Listing

The article reconstructs the practices governing the admission of securities to official quotation on the stock market of the early twentieth-century Russian Empire, using materials from the activities of the Moscow Exchange Committee. At the center of the study is the listing procedure as a key market-regulatory mechanism through which the interests of exchange institutions, the Ministry of Finance, and the Ministry of Trade and Industry intersected. The aim of the article is to show how decisions to admit or refuse the admission of securities to quotation were made at the level of individual firms, which criteria were applied by regulators, and what consequences followed from the divergence between market-based and ministerial logics of securities valuation. The study draws on archival materials of the Moscow Exchange Committee and makes it possible to move beyond an analysis of formal regulatory prescriptions toward an examination of actual administrative and expert practice. It demonstrates that the Exchange Committee regarded quotation as an instrument for ensuring a reliable market valuation of securities, grounded in their liquidity, breadth of circulation, and the financial soundness of the issuer. In this context, the principal admission criteria included the presence of regular demand, transparent reporting, a stable asset position of the enterprise, and the absence of signs of artificial price formation. The most frequent grounds for refusal were the illiquidity of securities, the weakness of reserve capital, losses, a high dependence on short-term credit, and the questionable quality of assets. Particular attention is paid to the conflict between exchange-based and ministerial interpretations of the functions of quotation. Whereas for the Moscow Exchange Committee the inclusion of a security in the exchange bulletin was meant to confirm its marketability and to serve as a guarantee of correct price indication, for government departments quotation also had a practical function as a benchmark for bank collateral operations. As a result of the Ministry of Finance circular of 1899, commercial banks were allowed to accept predominantly quoted securities as collateral, which stimulated numerous petitions for the inclusion in quotation lists of illiquid shares issued by family-owned and closed commercial-industrial partnerships. This gave rise to a prolonged controversy between the Moscow Exchange Committee and ministerial agencies. The Exchange Committee consistently pointed out that the registration of accidental or isolated transactions in the bulletin did not reflect the real value of a security and created conditions for price manipulation aimed at artificially inflating the collateral value of assets.